Not all the lessons learned at college take place in the classroom. That’s one of the takeaways from Woodlands of the Mind: Rambles Through Campus Forests by Kevin O’Donnell and Scott Honeycutt. There’s more. You learn that stately old buildings aren’t the only prominent landmarks on campus. Some are growing right outside. "Readers should take note that this collection of essays is about more than the actual forests themselves," noted Joan Maloof, executive director of the Old-Growth Forest Network. "Here are stories about daughters, and deer, rivers, and roads, soldiers, and slaves, stiltgrass, and stones, politics, and pollutants, gales, and glaciers, hills, and history...These things determine the birth and the death of the forests," stated Maloof in the book's foreword. As you tour the forests of the 15 colleges the authors visited for their book. you learn that some schools have a lot of trees. Take Berry College in Rome, Ga., for example, the first stop on the Woodlands tour. Berry College is a private school with 2,300 students. The campus size is 27,000 acres, nearly as large as the peninsula that holds the city of San Francisco, O’Donnell notes. Not all of the land is developed, of course. Eighty percent of the campus footprint is unoccupied by buildings. Part of that land is a working pine plantation where the college cuts loblolly pine for income. A wildlife management area, maintained by the state of Georgia, occupies part of the college land while another portion of the property is devoted to restoring longleaf pines in the region. Longleaf pine used to dominate across the South, but by 1995, less than 3 percent of the tree’s original range of 92 million acres was still longleaf pine. In case you’re wondering (and one of the wonders of Woodlands is the information provided on a wide variety of topics), the longleaf pine holds a mystical place among forest lovers. “With no deciduous leaves to rustle, the wind blows through the long, finely tuned needles, creating a music that people who have heard it say is unlike any other sound on earth,” stated O’Donnell. There’s also the longleaf fragrance: “People who have experienced it say that the olfactory sensation of being in the middle of an intact longleaf forest is like no other,” he added. One of the quotes used in the book comes from Aldo Leopold, the celebrated author of A Sand County Almanac: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” Among the wounds we suffer in Woodlands is learning that, in 2010, at Ohio University’s Dysart Woods, one of the last remaining stands of old-growth trees (white oak, sugar maple, and beech) in the state of Ohio, the Ohio Valley Coal Co. dug a coal mine under the forest. Within a year, half of the old-growth trees died. Dysart Woods, which is an hour-and-a-half drive from the school campus, is now run by a conservancy. The book also focuses on those who love the trees on the various campuses visited. One of those is Clint Patterson, the 10th forester at Berea College in Kentucky, who follows in the footsteps of the school’s first forester, Silas Mason (1857-1931). Patterson said Suffolk Punch draft horses are now used to pull logs for selective logging done in the Berea Forest, where the money earned goes back into the school’s forestry program. Honeycutt said that white oak from the carefully maintained Berea Forest has helped restore two celebrated ocean-going vessels, Mayflower II, a replica of the ship that brought the Pilgrims to this country, and Western Flyer, a boat once used by author John Steinbeck and marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who collaborated on The Sea of Cortez (1941). Woodlands discusses the many challenges facing forest maintenance in the 21st century: money troubles (no small matter for some schools), invasive plant species, extreme weather, and deer. O’Donnell and Honeycutt included the following from a 2022 issue of Natural Lands Magazine: “The most dangerous wild animal in Pennsylvania has caused 69 deaths and 6,208 injuries in the past five years. It’s ruining crops, damaging future timber harvests, and changing the state’s forest composition. It’s not the black bear, bobcat, or wild boar. It’s the official state animal of Pennsylvania (and Illinois, along with 10 other states): the white-tailed deer. And humans made it so.” The problem with having so many deer is that they eat some plants but not others, so invasive plants take over forests in many places, the authors noted. Rutgers University finally had to install fencing around Mettler’s Woods to keep the deer out, allowing native plants to rebound. “The story of academic forests is still unfolding, and the future is anything but certain,” warn the authors, suggesting that since the 15 schools represented in Woodlands are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to collegiate forests, readers would do well to explore some of the hundreds of others found across the country for themselves.
